Sherry Lyn Marginet

My name is Sherry Lyn, and my first HAAM event was a trip to the Canadian Fossil Discovery Centre in the summer of 2014. I’ve enjoyed the meetings, the events, the people and the openness found at HAAM.

I came from the Anglican Church. We went there because my mom didn’t drive, and it was the closest, so we could walk to it. My sisters and I weren’t baptized until I was about ten years of age, followed by confirmation about three years later. I attended church more or less regularly, even going on my own after confirmation. I really felt I needed some strength to face each week. I guess I didn’t even notice that it was me getting through my struggles, with the help of family and friends.

My parents (Mom – Catholic; Dad – never was sure, just not religious) had their share of heartaches with me. Born healthy, my life was good until I had a brain hemorrhage, followed by extended epileptic seizures directly afterward, at eighteen months. Let’s make this quick – after that I stopped speaking until I was about three; developed asthma and allergies; and had pneumonia about five times before kindergarten. When I was about ten, the symptoms started changing with my epilepsy. Besides seizures, the incidence of muscle spasms peaked, and the doctors weren’t sure, but it seemed I was losing sensation on my right side. After testing (this was forty years ago), all they could do was open up my skull to see what they were dealing with. Upside of that surgery was that they found no tumour; downside was that it caused paralysis of my right side. That’s the me you may know.

Now what’s the saying? God only gives you what you can handle. Yeah!?

Somehow in this church life I was comfortable in, I had a love of all things science. Though somehow in my brain I was able to continue in my faith. Can you see the problem? Thankfully, when I needed help and asked to speak to one of the two reverends from my church, he couldn’t spare the time. Lucky me! That started me really questioning why I was attending services. I did some more thinking, and walked away from church. Now this didn’t mean all my faith was gone. Like a headache passing, that took some time.

Luckily with our children, we didn’t take them to be baptized or attend Mass. We were asked once when in they were in their early twenties, why we didn’t do the “church thing” with them. We told them that this way, if they wanted to, they still could choose to go.